What happens when companies are acquired? If it’s ViaWest, it continues to grow.

Five months after getting acquired for $1.2 billion, the Greenwood Village Internet hosting company said Wednesday it committed to a third data center in Oregon to help customers keep their data secure online in the cloud. The Brookwood data center will be 200,000-square feet. It is scheduled to open in the third quarter of 2015.

Rendering of new ViaWest data center in Oregon. This third Oregon facility is called Brookwood. Image courtesy of ViaWest.

The location choice is intended to attract customers from neighboring states, like California and Washington, because of a built-in Oregon incentive: the state has no sales tax.

ViaWest has been in Oregon for “over ten years” David Leonard, ViaWest’s chief data center officer said in a statement.

The company said about 20 people will work at the data center. Another “10-20 vendor personnel” will be on site, plus about 15 to 30 customer employees at any given time.

“The ‘indirect effect’ on employment by data centers is far larger than the direct ViaWest employment,” noted the company.

The company has 27 other data centers, including five in Colorado. ViaWest employs 195 people in Colorado
and 388 company-wide.

You don’t have to wait in a virtual line for the opportunity to pay Sling TV for its new online TV service. The Dish Network-backed venture opened its TV service to everyone today.

The 411: Sling TV offers more than one dozen live TV channels — including ESPN, Disney and HGTV — for $20 a month. Customers need a separate broadband Internet service to be view the channels via apps on an iPad, smartphone, Android devices and Roku 3’s.

Microsoft has jumped on this “holiday,” which is a good thing for readers who struggle with a sluggish computer. At the Park Meadows Mall store in Lone Tree today, consumers can bring their equipment to the Answer Desk at the Microsoft store (second floor near Macy’s — here’s the link) and get some free help.

The store’s tech staff promise to try to fix slow computer, troubleshoot repairs no matter what brand and answer technical questions. And Microsoft tells me that consumers can bring in their tech devices no matter what brand, where it was purchased or what operating software is on it. Looks like they just may even attempt helping Apple users.

J.D. Power attributed the gains to better online tools to communicate with customers — “especially the chat function,” said the report. It noted that online chat overall is efficient and immediate, making it more satisfying to customers seeking a resolution.

The study, in its 13th year, measures how satisfied customers are when interacting with their wireless carriers over the phone, at a store and online. It took into account length of hold times, problem resolution efficiency and processing issues. And it ranked companies on a 1,000 point scale.

With AT&T taking the lead in the full-service category with 786 points out of 1,000, there appears room for improvement. It was 9 points ahead of T-Mobile and 13 above the average. Sprint ranked the lowest, at 746.

New Belgium Brewing Company said Wednesday it outsourced all of its “business critical IT operations” to ViaWest, the Denver data-center company that offers oodles of cloud-based services to keep customer websites and other Internet adventures operating.

The Fort Collins brewery has way too many other things to focus on than have staff make sure offices can communicate with one another. New Belgium is currently expanding east with a $140 million brewery in Asheville, North Carolina. That brewery is expected to be in full production by the end of the year.

Until now, New Belgium handled its IT operations in-house. By outsourcing the tech stuff to ViaWest, the beer maker says it “frees up the brewery’s internal team to improve and innovate processes.”

“In order to accommodate our growth nationwide and craft beer distribution coast to coast for the first time in our history, New Belgium required an expert partner in which to house our mission critical IT environments,” Travis Morrison, New Belgium’s Director of IT, said in a statement. “We found such a partner in ViaWest. Now, with our ViaWest cloud solution, we can communicate with our brewing facilities seamlessly, improving our scalability and reliability.”

No word on whether New Belgium will be paying ViaWest with in-house happy hours.

Level 3 Communications, after nearly two decades, is growing and is bigger than it was a year ago. Annual revenues are up from a year earlier, thanks to growth of its core network services, the company announced today in its fourth-quarter and year-end report. Plus, it posted its first annual profit since going public in 1998.

Add in its Littleton-based TW Telecom acquisition, and Level 3’s numbers showed it grew even more. The TW Telecom purchase added 3,407 employees in October. TW Telecom also saw its revenues grow 7.7 percent last year from 2013. Level 3 employs more than 13,000 people today.

The Broomfield company got its Level 3 moniker and officially went public in 1998. But it started more than a decade earlier in Omaha, Neb. as part of a subsidiary of Peter Kiewit Sons. As a huge supplier of Internet infrastructure to the dot-com industry during the early 2000’s, Level 3 got pummeled by the tech downtown. Some folks didn’t think the company would make it. But it continued to plug away and obviously survived.

In the last quarter of 2014, Level 3’s net income came in at $45 million, up from the year-ago quarter of $14 million. Total fourth-quarter revenues, excluding one-time costs like the TW Telecom acquisition, reached $1,634 million, up from same time a year ago’s $1,602 million.

With the TW Telecom purchase, Level 3 posted revenues of $2,052 million in the fourth quarter, compared to $1,987 million a year earlier. Annual revenues came in at $8,123 million.

For the year, net income came in at $293 million, up from the prior year’s net loss of $109 million. Revenues edged up to $6.497 billion, from $6.313 billion in 2013.

Dish’s new Sling TV service, which offers online-access to ESPN and other live-TV channels for $20 a month, is still not open to the general public. But on Monday, it added about a dozen Spanish-language channels that will be available to Sling subscribers.

Sling TV, a new online TV service from Dish Network.

The agreement with Univision Communications is for “multi-stream rights for live and Video-On-Demand.” It adds these channels to Sling TV’s lineup:

Univision Network

UniMás

UDN (Univision Deportes Network)

Galavisión

El Rey Network

Bandamax

De Película

De Película Clásico

Telehit

tlnovelas

FOROtv

Dish did not elaborate how the channels will be offered to subscribers. At the moment, Sling TV offers 20 channels for $20 a month. Additional channels targeting kids, news and sports will also be offered for $5 more per month. Right now, interested consumers can only sign up on Sling TV’s site. Dish has not announced a public launch date but said that it has started accepting some customers on a first-come basis.

Dish experimented with this “over the top” service through DishWorld, which features international content. But currently, DishWorld’s Spanish-language service does not include Univision.

Can’t make it to Super Bowl XLIX? Broomfield’s Level 3 Communications ha got you covered to make sure the game shows up on your TV, tablet and smartphone.

Few of us today are actually in Arizona with tickets to the Super Bowl. Not that many Broncos fans want to be at the actual game, but I’m betting quite a few of you are watching it on your big TV, tablet and even smartphone.

Level 3 constructed broadcast centers at the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz and has staffed the facilities with six people. In addition, the company tells me, Level 3 has “a support staff managing every live feed and broadcast globally for our Broomfield and Tulsa, OK network operations centers.”

While the game broadcast will only last about 3 to 4 hours, Level 3 says it must manage “more than 3,000 hours of video content,” which it must encode and transport over its Vyvx VenueNet+ platform as part of the Super Bowl coverage. That includes providing video for MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and other televised shows.

Lots of testing was done to make sure the game gets to your device. It’s not the first year Level 3 is responsible for getting the Super Bowl to viewers. But it is the first time they made a nifty graphic explaining how they do it. Click on the image on the right to see how the game gets to your device.

First month of 2015 is just about over and the local tech scene has exploded! This is month four for me covering local tech for The Denver Post. I knew that I couldn’t be comprehensive but it’s hard not to notice everything going on. I couldn’t get to everything so I’m wrapping it up in one convenient post to end the week.

MONEY: Techstars’ new $150 million fund Those Techstars graduates get a lot of publicity and advice, but a measly $118,000. Not anymore! Techstars Ventures announced Jan. 28 that it raised a new $150 million fund “to invest in companies emerging from the Techstars ecosystem.” Possible recipients aren’t limited to Techstars graduates, but also new companies started by alumni or mentors. Read more about how something like this gets started on Techstars co-founder Brad Feld’s blog: “How To Raise A $150 Million VC Fund.”

Accelerator #1: MergeLaneI wrote on Tuesday about the new female-focused business accelerator by Sue Heilbronner and Elizabeth Kraus. MergeLane announced its first class of eight companies that will go through its 12-week program packed with advice in starting up, getting ahead and watching out for issues women leaders face. Check it out: “Female-friendly accelerator thinks big, launches 12-week program.”

Galvanize adds non-profit to tackle diversityAt Galvanize, the collaboration space that has become the startup’s go-to spot to office, has made the issue of getting more women involved in technology a priority. But a growing part of Galvanize is the school inside the building. GSchool offers students a fast-track to learning the computer software and other data science programs that tech employers want to see in future employees. While it has a pretty good track record on diversity — it says 30 to 50 percent of students have been women — on Monday, it made diversity a priority. It announced the Galvanize Foundation, a non-profit aimed at providing education opportunities to the historically underrepresented populations and provide a conduit for founders, companies and investors. One hundred percent of the money donated to the foundation goes to scholarships and program support. More details: galvanize.it/foundation

First gigabit, now Longmont Startup WeekGo Longmont, I say! As the first city in Colorado to start offering residents Gigabit-speed Internet, Longmont is now planning its very own startup week. Agenda is sparse at the moment, but I’m sure that won’t be for long. Dubbed LSW15: The Heart of Startup, the week-long event occurs June 1 to June 5. The event is being organized by the volunteer group Startup Longmont, which has 300 members and was founded by the TinkerMill maker space.

More Money: Dizzion’s desktop in the cloud gets $3.9 million
Getting employees and customers on the cloud in order to better and share resources helped Denver’s Dizzion Inc. raise $3.9 million in Series A funding. Dizzion offers a service that puts the desktop in the cloud. That eliminates actual desktop configuration and allows companies to be device agnostic. But it also adds security because a company can control what is shared with employees and customers. It sells its tools through data centers like ViaWest, where most of Dizzion’s management team hails. The company, which launched in 2011, employs nine. The $3.9 million investment was led by Grotech Ventures and Access Venture Partners.

Sixteen startups, 3 minutes each (give or take) and 2 hours. Okay, make that 3. Galvanize’s first-ever Colorado Demo Day ended Thursday night with the crowd gathered around the bar as judges took about 15 minutes to make their decisions.

Congrats to the three winners — Native, RXRevu and Conspire – who now get to travel to California and make a pitch to Google! (Last year’s hand-picked winner from Galvanize, GoSpotCheck, nabbed a $100,000 investment from judge Steve Case of AOL fame.)

Things really do happen at Galvanize, the alternative work space in downtown Denver that is more like an inventor’s modern-day garage only with lots of inventors who trade tips and resources while waiting in line for caffeine.

Galvanize co-founder and emcee Lawrence Mandes.

Instead of the Galvanize board hearing pitches from 10 companies as it did last year to pick its entry in the Google for Entrepreneur’s Demo Day, co-founder Lawrence Mandes said he wanted to involve outsiders to make sure Google got the best of Colorado. Judges included outsiders like Parker Thompson, partner at 500 Startups; Nicole Glaros, managing director of Techstars Boulder; and Christine Chin from Blue Ocean Holdings the CSU Blue Ocean Enterprise Challenge. Nick Wyman with Galvanize Ventures and the co-founders of last year’s winner GoSpotCheck also got a vote.

All 16 companies are based at either the Denver or Boulder office of Galvanize, which if you’re unfamiliar with the concept it’s an office space that rents out a seat or a suite to startups. But Galvanize doesn’t like to think of itself as a landlord. It’s more like a gym where entrepreneurs pay monthly membership fees to get access to office necessities, networking and opportunities from accidental collisions.

The winner rundown:

Native – A mobile app/service that uses a mix of artificial intelligence and real people to bring back the concierge-like attention of old-school travel agents. For example, if your plane gets canceled, Native has already rebooked you on a new flight. What probably caught the judges’ attention, besides a smooth presentation by co-founder Devon Tivona, was that with no marketing budget it attracted 1,000 users, including 300 willing to pay $20 a month. “We’ve had a beta out for only four days. And we have $6,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Do you guys want an update next week?” Tivona asked. Claps, applause, You’re going to Google!

RXRevu — According to this Denver company’s research, most prescriptions go to waste and about one-third of the people who need them can’t afford the medicine. RXRevu put together a sizeable database of drugs that has approximate costs so people aren’t shocked when they fill a prescription at the pharmacy. It also offers more affordable alternatives. Consumer friendly and useful!

Conspire — Poking fun at the uselessness of LinkedIn’s connections, Conspire figured out a better way for you to connect with people you don’t know at all. It relies on who you actually know and that person’s network. And it’s not a guessing game or contest to see how many connections you can get. Rather, Conspire tracks your email. Yes, a wee scary but apparently Conspire figures out who you know and how well by how often you interact via email. Conspire has 15,000 active users, which translates to 35 million people. That compares to LinkedIn’s 90 million people eight years after going public. “We’ll cross that this year. That’s the power of email as a data source,” said co-founder Alex Devkar.

Standing room only at Galvanize’s first Colorado Demo Day.

Another winner was Parkifi, which isn’t getting a spot on the Google Trip but it’s getting fast-tracked to pitch at another competition in Fort Collins called CSU Blue Ocean Enterprises Challenge. Parkifi offers a parking app that tells you exactly where available parking spots are. That would have come in handy tonight because parking next to Galvanize is left to the street. Parkifi’s hurdle, however, is that it must equip its parking-garage customers with a sensor on every space. That way it knows which precise spots are empty and can direct drivers to the exact location in a garage. The sensors are apparently long-lasting with 5-year batteries. Parkifi says it just signed a “the world’s largest mall operator” and 40 locations, which is bringing in $300,000 in monthly recurring revenue for Parkifi. Good start!

Interestingly, these four companies were all pitched by men. But of the remaining 12, half were pitched by female founders or co-founders. And of those, the companies are involved in security (Front Door Software), oil and gas (Earth Index), e-commerce (Bold Betties Outfitters), mobile apps (Makeena), farming and restaurants (Rooster Market) and online dating (Meet Mindful).

“At Galvanize, anyone who has the aptitude and ambition should have access to the abundance that exists in the technical sector. We work incredibly hard to democratize (the opportunities),” said Nick Wyman, a managing director at Galvanize and one of the Demo Day judges.

Galvanize offers advanced software engineering courses that are useful for running a business. Its programs typically have between 30 to 50 percent female enrolled. Wyman said he believes it helps to attract a diverse student body — and Galvanize company membership — with that track record.

Tamara Chuang covers personal technology and local tech news for The Denver Post. She previously spent 10 years doing the same thing for The Orange County Register before taking a hiatus to move here and become a SAHM to a precocious toddler.

Laura Keeney is a business reporter with The Denver Post, covering aerospace, aviation and biotech. Over the last two decades, she's covered everything from agribusiness to punk rock. Keeney holds an AACSB-accredited MBA from St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY.